Happy Gilmore 2 (2025)

Nostalgia can be dangerous. An overreliance on the past can be a handicap. There's no reason for some things to be revived except for purely sentimental reasons. This wasn't one of them.

This film features many callbacks accompanied by old clips cribbed from the first movie to make you remember how much you enjoyed that one and desperately try to recreate those old feelings. Most of the time, it falls flat.

My other complaint is that comedies are too long nowadays. It's completely self-indulgent for this to be two hours. Clip it at 90 minutes and leave out all the fluff. It ages better that way. 

I sound like an old fuddy-duddy now. I didn't hate everything about it, I just wish it tried to do something different. For some people, same-old will be perfectly acceptable. It just feels sadder when these people are in their 50s.

1½ gratuitous cameos out of 5

Happy Gilmore (1996)

Demonstrating he has range, Sandler's next headlining role had him portraying a failed hockey player with anger issues who channels his rage into his golf game in order to save his grandmother's house from foreclosure. He sparks a rivalry with the villainous Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald), while learning the skills of the game from the one-armed Chubbs (Carl Weathers). The humor in this movie is all over the map, but there are enough memorable moments to cement this as a classic and one of The Sandman's defining roles.

3 fores out of 5

Beverly Hills Ninja (1997)

Chris Farley's next big screen outing proved that he could capably headline his own solo feature film. Adopted into a Japanese monestary as a baby and believed to be the prophecized "Great White Ninja," Haru is raised as one of their own and trained in the ninjutsu ways, but still grows up to be fat and clumsy. He is recruited on a mission to Beverly Hills by a beautiful woman where it becomes a strange fish out of water story, in a take on films like American Ninja and Beverly Hills Cop. The laughs are big and broad, which might not be suited to everyone's sensibilities, but it's funny if you bring yourself down to its level. These movies are sweet at their core and don't deserve the amount of critical vitriol they received at the time. I just want to live in the spaces where it exists because life seemed a lot simpler back then.

3½ astral projections out of 5

The Howling (1981)

News anchor woman suffers a trauma and is given a leave of absence at a colony resort where all sorts of strange stuff happens. Something to do with shapeshifting creatures…hmmm. Kind of dull in some places, but that ending cements it as a classic. This one inspired a shitload of sequels and I’ve seen every single one of them (except the latest that came out a couple weeks ago) and they all suck, or blow, or whatever (silver bullet?).

3.5 adult arcades out of 5